Pictured: Fool Me Once and Society of the Snow – Credit: Netflix
It’s time for another weekly rundown of the biggest stories from Netflix’s top 10 hourly figures drop for the week ending January 6th, 2024. This week, we’ll be covering Fool Me Once, The Society of the Snow, Bitconned, The Brothers Sun, and another deep dive into Netflix Engagement Report covering the first half of 2023.
Every Tuesday, Netflix updates its top 10 stats page with 40 new hourly figures of the top movies and shows of the past seven days. If you want to browse the top 10 hourly data, you can use our tool, which we’ve finally just incorporated the views metric that Netflix has been using. We’ve also built a tool that allows you to browse all the data from the Netflix Engagement Report.
Note: In this report of Netflix’s hours viewed from January 1st, 2024 to January 6th, 2024, we’ll use “Complete Viewings Equivalent,” or CVE, expressed in millions. That means we divide the hours viewed announced by Netflix by the runtime of films or series. It allows for better comparisons between films and series, but it’s not an audience metric. It is the minimum number of viewings if they were all complete from the first second to the last of the film or season.
1. The Society of the Snow is Netflix’s last prestige play of the year (and its biggest so far).
The Society of the Snow is this year’s All Quiet on the Western Front as the Spanish survival film launched with a great 22.9M CVEs over its first four days, a true blockbuster launch for what is essentially Netflix’s last big prestige play of its 2023 movie line-up.
Critics and audiences alike only have rave reviews about the film, so it will undoubtedly play all January long, helped by a very light movie line-up.
Society of the Snow might also end up in the all-time Top 10, but to know how high, we will need to wait for next week.
2. New technology documentaries are not working well on Netflix.
Bitcoin is the latest example of how technology documentaries might be appealing to a certain demographic, but they have not yet crossed over to general audiences.
Bitconned launched last Monday on New Year’s Day and over its first seven days, it only got 4.9M CVEs, one of the lowest launches for a documentary released on a Monday, just above the one about Killer Robots.
3. Don’t be fooled by Fool Me Once: it’s a big success, but…
English limited series Fool Me Once, based on Harlan Coben’s book, was probably the perfect binge-series for New Year’s Day and the week after as it launched with a huge 37.1M CVEs over its first seven days. Series released on a Monday are not that common on Netflix, but out of the few in my dataset, it’s the best one.
Now, it’s a big success because of its release on a Monday, but we can expect a huge drop next week. And it is also a reminder that the day of release in the week is very important when we look at those numbers. The self-imposed Monday to Sunday window for the Top 10 with some preferred days for releases (such as Thursday or Friday) create a prism that is being challenged when a huge series open on a Monday.
4. The sun is already probably setting on The Brothers Sun
Michelle Yeoh is not lucky at the moment.
Her Disney+ series American Born Chinese was canceled last week, and if we were gambling, we would say that her new Netflix series The Brothers Sun is heading in the same direction as it launched with only 4.1M CVEs over its first four days.
When we look at all the English-speaking series released on a Thursday of years past and their fate, we can see that The Brothers Sun is swimming in shady waters.
5. Rebel Moon: Part 1 is getting eclipsed and fast.
After a somewhat good second week, Rebel Moon: Part 1 lost 67% of its viewing hours in its third week, a fast decaying rate that officially places the film as the 9th best launch of any English-language Netflix films released in 2023, between rom-com Your Place or Mine and animated film Leo which showed better legs and is already topping 100M CVEs, a number Rebel Moon will not see any time soon, if not ever, even with the release of the Director’s cut or the second film.
6. Netflix Data Dump big dive: Golden Globe edition!
Beef was the highlight of the latest edition of the Golden Globes taking home three awards in the limited series category. Using the Netflix Engagement Report, we’ll now take another deep dive into the Big Netflix Data Dump, as those are series that did not have a new or recent activity following their release. They have just been living their “catalog” life since their release, and I have selected 5 of them that were nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Limited Series over the past years.
What’s surprising to me here is that Dahmer, The Queen’s Gambit, and Maid all had basically the same viewing activity between January and June 2023, even if they were released in 2020, 2021, and 2022 (even September 2022 for Dahmer, which should give it a bit more of an edge since it’s closer to the observation period of the Engagement report). Unorthodox is the least-watched, but it’s also the least high-profile.
In the next Engagement Report, we will be able to see if there are any changes for those series during the next six months and if this is their “threshold viewing,” under which they will not fall.
That’s all for this week, feel free to let us know what you think in the comments below.